Sherlock Holmes (28 page)

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Authors: James Lovegrove

BOOK: Sherlock Holmes
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I told myself not to be absurd. How would I account for my own presence there? What if the watchman tried to apprehend me and found Elias Ashmole’s chain on my person? Moreover, I was carrying a gun. With such
prima facie
evidence stacked against me, they might as well not bother with a trial. I would be as good as convicted.

I moved onward until I reached the stairs. The cold stone steps whispered underfoot as I descended. I had no idea where Holmes had got to, but my principal aim was to quit the building as fast as I dared. Holmes had left me to fend for myself. The least I could do was return the courtesy.

As I re-entered the Thinking Engine chamber I spied a tall, lean figure stooping in front of the machine. My forefinger was curled round the trigger of my gun, and my nerves were so on edge that I very nearly fired. Some instinct prevented me, and I am more than glad that it did, for the figure straightened up and I perceived the angular posture and unmistakable aquiline profile of Sherlock Holmes.

“Holmes!” I declared. “Good God, it’s you!”

“Who else would it be?”

“Well, Moran for one. Or some other undesirable, perhaps Moran’s master. Did you not say you heard a sound when we were upstairs? Isn’t that why you crept off, to investigate?”

“Oh, that,” said Holmes airily. “Yes, it seems my ears were playing tricks on me. There was no one.”

“Really?”

“Really. I apologise for alarming you without cause.”

“Never mind alarming me. I just came within an inch of shooting you.”

“I am grateful for your restraint,” said Holmes.

Sometimes his unflappability could be maddening. I un-cocked the hammer and stowed my revolver.

“You still have the chain on you, I trust,” he said.

“Of course.”

“Good. I was concerned you might have jettisoned it, for fear of being caught red-handed.”

“You do me an injustice,” I said, although the thought of ditching the purloined artefact had occurred to me and I had been tempted to act on it.

Holmes proffered the knapsack with the flap open, and I dropped the chain within.

“Shall we take steps to remove ourselves now?” I said. “We have done what we set out to do. Ashmole’s chain is ours, the forgery installed in its place. I, for one, would like to put the whole episode, and the University Galleries, behind us.”

“You’re right. Best not push our luck and outstay our welcome. Give me a boost, would you? There’s a good fellow.”

I helped Holmes up into the fanlight aperture, he in turn hauled me through, and presently we were reinstalling the window, using glazier’s putty to secure it in place. The putty would not hold indefinitely but would suffice for the time being, affixing the window frame so that nobody would notice it had been jemmied out, not unless they examined it closely.

I wasn’t at all sad to be climbing back out of the courtyard, feeling nothing but relief to be on the street once more. At a stroke, Holmes and I were no longer burglars; we were a pair of friends out for a late-night stroll. At least that was what anyone might think, to look at us. In the event, there was no one else around. St Giles’ was empty, flickeringly gas-lit.

“A good night’s work,” Holmes said.

Having exchanged a few further words, we parted company, he heading round the corner to the Randolph, I northward along St Giles’ towards Mrs Bruell’s.

Tomorrow would see the fruition of Holmes’s plan and, I hoped, make the trauma of tonight’s exploits worthwhile. If all went well, then, at last, we would be finished with Oxford, and we could return to Baker Street. I looked forward to that outcome with no little eagerness.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
T
HE
N
UANCES OF
L
ANGUAGE

The following day, at 11a.m. sharp, we gathered in the Thinking Engine chamber. Aside from myself and Holmes, present were Professor Quantock, Archie Slater, Inspector Tomlinson and Lord Knaresfield. The last had journeyed south from his Yorkshire home especially for the occasion and made no bones about the fact that he regarded this as an intolerable imposition.

“I have better things to do than be summoned – summoned, I say, as though I’m some manservant – down to Oxford for no apparent reason.”

“My letter, your lordship, was more in the way of a request,” Holmes said. “If you interpreted it as anything other, I crave your forgiveness.”

“Up to Oxford,” said Quantock quietly. “One al-always goes up to Oxford, n-never down.”

“Up, down, what ruddy difference does it make?” snapped Knaresfield. “I had to be here, or so Mr Holmes told me, and here I am, but I don’t have to be chuffed about it.”

“Again, I can only crave forgiveness,” said Holmes. “As for there being ‘no apparent reason’ for your attendance, I assure you it is otherwise. You will want very much to know the truth about the Thinking Engine and the part it has played in recent events in this city.”

“Aye, well, you hinted as much, didn’t you? Your letter implied dark dealings, and if you’re accusing me of being in any way involved in those – me! – I should like you to say it to my face. I may have a title, I may be all gentrified, but that won’t stop me from giving you a right good pasting, sir, if I perceive a personal slight.”

“Oh, you are involved,” said Holmes, “and you know it. There has been villainy afoot here, villainy of various stripes.”

“What’s this?” Slater piped up. “Villainy? You had me write about an impossible puzzle, Dr Watson, and I duly did so. You’ll have seen yesterday’s edition of the
News
. There was my piece, on page ten. Just a couple of column inches, but we had to reset the whole page to fit it in. ‘Sherlock Holmes vows to turn the tables on the Thinking Engine…’ You never said there was anything more to it than that.”

“Watson told you as much as I told him to, Mr Slater,” said Holmes, “and not one word of it was a lie. He just didn’t give you the whole picture. We desired your presence, like Lord Knaresfield, and we knew you would come if only to follow up on the article. You sensed there would be some sort of denouement today, the capstone to your series of features about the Engine. How could you stay away?”

“A rotten trick,” Slater huffed.

“I imagine you have used underhand tactics more than once in your career in order to obtain a story. You cannot really complain if someone does the same to you. The biter bit, et cetera.”

“Do I still get my exclusive interview?”

“I am not one to renege on a promise.”

“Well, that’s something, I suppose.”

“I should be at the Friends Meeting House right now,” said Tomlinson. “I’m not happy about giving up my Sunday morning worship for a work-related matter. The wife is even less happy about it. Mind you, the message you left for me at the station made it seem as though I didn’t have a choice, Mr Holmes. Catching a ‘Machiavellian multiple-murderer’, isn’t that how you put it?”

“That is my goal today, no less,” said Holmes, “and even Mrs Tomlinson must appreciate that there can be few things more important than that.”

The policeman grumbled discontentedly but said nothing further.

“For my p-part,” said Quantock, “I’m keen to know how my Engine can f-fail to solve this puzzle of yours. Why w-would you wish to keep t-testing it anyway? Has it n-not proved its worth several t-times over?”

“Perhaps you should start it up, professor,” said Holmes, “and then we’ll see.”

While Quantock got the motor going, my friend paced the room. He had not vouchsafed to me the full extent of his plan, and I was somewhat concerned that the Thinking Engine would unequivocally identify the two of us as thieves. What’s more, it would do so in the presence of a police inspector and a journalist. Only by some nimble footwork would we be able to extricate ourselves from
that
predicament.

Once the Engine was up and running, Holmes said, “Gentlemen, you are all aware that there has been a rash of murders in Oxford. They began more or less when Professor Quantock’s device first came to public attention. One might be inclined to regard this as a coincidence. Certainly the city was not immune to the blight of murder before the Thinking Engine was built, and the tawdry business of the Grainger killings in Jericho seemed the kind of violent domestic crime which is, alas, all too commonplace amongst the lower echelons of society. The only thing that was unusual about it was the level of guile shown by the culprit in deflecting suspicion away from himself. I myself would have thought little further of it, had I not been drawn ineluctably towards the conclusion that Nahum Grainger had an accomplice.”

“Accomplice?” said Tomlinson. “This is news to me.”

“Is it? Next, we had the matter of the poison pen letters to Professor Merriweather of Magdalen College, which culminated in the death-by-strychnine of Aubrey Bancroft. Bancroft, like Grainger, had an accomplice who, it seemed, turned on him. The pattern was repeated with Hugh Llewellyn, shot to death outside the Oriel boathouse.”

“Yes,” said Tomlinson, “and try though we might, Oxford police still haven’t got to the bottom of that one. They’re all three of them linked, these cases? Is that it?”

“Very much so. They are all shoots from the same plant, and it is a highly toxic specimen of flora which has its roots right here, in this very room.”

“You’re saying the Thinking Engine is involved?” said Knaresfield.

“M-my Engine?” said Quantock. He gave a brittle laugh. “That’s ab-absurd. I know it’s ingenious, but to accuse it of b-being at the heart of a c-criminal operation…”

“That is exactly what I am accusing it of,” said Holmes. “At every turn the Engine has swiftly and readily provided solutions to the conundrums placed before it.”

“Just as it was d-designed to.”

“And how convenient that I have been present in the city all along to be outsmarted by it.”

“If you are res-resentful of the Engine’s prowess, th-that is your lookout. It reflects p-poorly on you, not on my m-machine.”

“My point is,” said Holmes, “what better way to solve puzzles than if one knows the answers already, and what better way to know the answers than if one sets the puzzles oneself?”

Knaresfield barked a laugh. “Now I’ve heard it all. Somehow the Thinking Engine has gone rogue and organised a series of elaborate crimes? Mr Holmes, it is an assemblage of cogs and dials and wires and other metal whatnots. It can no more do what you’re suggesting than a locomotive can stand up and walk.”

Holmes shot me a wry, surreptitious wink. Some five years earlier, he and I had seen something almost exactly matching Lord Knaresfield’s metaphorical comparison. Warned by Holmes’s wink, I refrained from commenting to that effect. Not that I would have. Mycroft Holmes had sworn us to secrecy on the topic, and moreover it would in no way enhance our credibility to bring it into the argument now. To this day, the memory of the ambulatory locomotive seems phantasmagorical, akin to one of H.G. Wells’s wilder imaginings; yet I know it to have been real, not fiction.

“Perhaps the Engine is just a machine,” Holmes said. “Perhaps it is more. I should like to establish that by asking it one simple question. Professor? If you’d care to start typing?”

“I’m not sure I want to,” said Quantock. “This is n-nothing but a cheap attempt to invalidate all my hard w-work. You have d-dreamed up some impossible problem, purely in order to d-discredit me and my invention.”

“Have you and your Engine not striven to discredit me? Can two not play at that game? Besides, I have never said that the problem is impossible, just that the Engine will be incapable of elucidating it fully. The two are not the same.”

“They sound the same,” said Slater.

“I would have thought a writer such as yourself would be attuned to the nuances of language, Mr Slater,” said Holmes. “Watson here would have no trouble fathoming the distinction.”

I nodded, even though I couldn’t myself see a significant difference between the two syntactical constructions.

“I still feel under no ob-obligation to g-go along with this farce,” said Quantock, folding his arms. “My Engine is n-not some plaything, built to assuage childish whims.”

“This is no whim, professor,” Holmes said. There was steel in his voice and a flinty spark in his eyes. “I should not like to force you to co-operate, but neither would it be wholly against my nature to do so.”

“F-force me?” The mathematician all at once looked very fierce, like a cornered rat.

“Or,” said Holmes, “I could simply thrust you aside and carry out the typing myself. Which would you rather?”

Quantock dipped his head and glowered. His nostrils were flaring, and I could sense the deep reservoir of anger beneath the meek exterior, the same temper that Edward Caird, the Master of Balliol, had unwittingly aroused.

Inspector Tomlinson stepped between him and Holmes, like a referee at a boxing match.

“Let there be no threats, please,” he said. “Let us behave like the cultured, civilised people we are. Professor, I’m not taking sides, but I am of the opinion that Mr Holmes has made a reasonable request. This all started with your Engine being set up in direct opposition to him, on the back of a wager. Is it not fair that he is given the opportunity to counter that challenge with one of his own? Natural justice demands it, even if there is no legal compunction for you to do as he asks.”

Further support came from an unexpected quarter. “Yes, professor,” said Slater. “Why the reluctance? Let Holmes have his head. The Engine will run rings around him. It has before.”

Lord Knaresfield added his voice to the chorus. “Go on, Quantock. Give us a show. Otherwise I’ll have come all this way for nowt!”

Quantock gave Knaresfield a hurt look, as though betrayed. Sullenly, he moved to the typing station.

“Very w-well,” he said. “If you in-insist. What’s the puzzle?”

Holmes bowed graciously. “It’s quite straightforward. What did Watson and I steal from the University Galleries last night?”

“Eh?”

Quantock’s surprise was echoed by Knaresfield and Slater, and most of all by Tomlinson.

“Steal?” the inspector said. “I hope, for your sake, that you’re joking, Mr Holmes.”

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